Best City-Owned Cemetery

Oakwood Cemetery

As genealogist Danny Camacho put it in a past Chronicle News feature ["City of the Dead," April 21, 2006], "A cemetery isn’t just a burial place for dead people. … In its own way, it’s very much alive." Like all cemeteries, Oakwood’s 40 acres are a reflection of their inhabitants’ living societies. In the more-than-century-old cemetery's pre-Civil Rights Movement days, if you had a family to claim you and you weren’t black or Latino, you got buried on the south side with a grave marker – maybe a plain wooden tombstone, or maybe a fancy carved or cast one. If you weren’t a pauper but still “colored,” your plot was probably marked by a small, plain tombstone, a wooden cross, or a single plank. Fast-forward to 2006. Oakwood serves as a kind of park for east/central neighborhood Swede Hill and surrounding areas. People stroll among the graves all the time.